Off a busy Delaware highway, down a gravel road, and just beyond a blooming green meadow stands a barn.
If you peek inside, you might see a cat or two curled up in a sun-filled spot or a row of ducks quacking on their morning stroll. Or, if you’re lucky, you can hear a rooster greeting the day with a full, mighty crow.
However, if you look a little closer, this barn is more than that. To many, it is a refuge where people of all ages and backgrounds come together, roll up their sleeves, and immerse themselves in the natural world.
For many more, it’s where they can offer compassion and care to themselves and each other. It’s the kind of journey Grateful Acres founder and CEO Ally Kennedy understands all too well.
After losing her parents, grandmother, and uncle within roughly a year and facing this grief amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy was struggling to heal. One morning, inside that same Middletown barn, she found an answer through one of her closest companions: her horse of 23 years, Miss Coolie.
“I just noticed that our breath started to sync, and I was just feeling a lot calmer,” she says. “I just sat there with her…had a good cry, and I knew in my heart that that second just changed me.”
Through Miss Coolie, and the spirit of her family, Kennedy “got [her] clarity back,” and brought Grateful Acres to life in June 2021.
Alongside a team of volunteers and several four- and two-legged friends, Kennedy has a vision to build a supportive space that incorporates the natural environment to promote community and self-care. In other words, it’s a care farm.
According to the Care Farm Network (CFN), care farming is defined as “the therapeutic use of farming practices” to promote healing. An extension of green care, care farms operate under supervised, structured programming, providing agricultural activities and services for individuals “with a defined need,” according to the United Kingdom–based charity Social Farms & Gardens. This includes rehabilitation and special education, as well as improving emotional, mental, and social health.
While care farms provide an individual-first approach to healing, they differ by the populations they serve. Several furnish services to clients with mental or physical health challenges, alcohol or substance use disorders, and intellectual or developmental disabilities.
“Ultimately, [care farming] is about participation and a sense of belonging,” says CFN outreach and communications consultant Kate Mudge. “[It is] allowing people to get their hands dirty and find value in just interacting with nature.”
With roots in many countries—the United Kingdom boasts nearly 400 facilities alone—care farming is still relatively new in the United States. According to CFN, as of 2024, there were 283 care farms registered in the U.S.—four of which, including Grateful Acres, are in Delaware.
A Bright Spot
A program under the auspices of West End Neighborhood House, spanning 3 acres close to Route 13, Bright Spot Urban Farm in New Castle knows about growth. According to program director Ruth Arias, Bright Spot was conceived nearly a decade ago to help young adults transitioning out of foster care learn about cultivating food and other products in urban areas.
Upon expanding and moving to the Delaware Health and Social Services’ Herman M. Holloway Sr. Campus, Arias says, the program shifted its focus to high school students, specifically those from low-income and at-risk neighborhoods across New Castle County.
“In their neighborhoods, some of them don’t have yards or trees, so this is a therapeutic space for them,” Arias says.
For 12 weeks during the summer, participants learn a wide range of agricultural skills, including landscaping, caring for plants in the greenhouse, and even customer service.
As many kids move forward, Arias and her team are impressed with how the children build a familial space and make changes of their own in a little over a year.
“Our whole purpose is not just to create farms but to have leaders out there in the world or in their community making a difference,” says Arias.
Taking R.O.O.T.S.
For Talon and Travis Holleman, the commitment to reconnection runs deep. After leaving their careers in nursing and business, respectively, the pair moved with their two children from their hometown of Baltimore to southern Delaware in 2017. Their intention was to spend more time together and “to go back to the basics” and find altruistic ways of learning.
Homeschooling their kids, Bella and Emmett, and moving to their 3-acre family homestead in Georgetown gave them an idea.
“The more we got into [homeschooling, the more] we wanted to build this structure of activities that you wouldn’t typically get in schools,” Travis explains.
After launching an after-school program in 2021 and hearing from community members who wanted to participate, Travis and Talon got the idea for the Reaching Outside of Traditional Schooling Youth + Development Program—also known as R.O.O.T.S.
“We just opened up the entire property to an educational playground,” Talon says.
R.O.O.T.S. allows children, teens, and young adults to get out of the classroom and into the natural world while building community through self-sufficiency and goodwill. This includes workshops on the homestead and activities such as job readiness, mentoring, and yoga.
Building on the pillars of regenerative farming, nature studies, bushcraft, animal husbandry, and homesteading, the Hollemans center programming on helping others form healthy, foundational social skills and how to use these same teachings to build connections with one another.
“With care farming, it just comes back to, we don’t have to do this alone,” Talon says. “We can come together as a team.”
Throughout their time, clients learn to contribute to the farm and homestead while working alongside licensed behavioral and mental health clinicians in one-on-one, group, and family sessions. They also participate in mindfulness activities and enjoy free time.
A Lasting Impact
Domenica Personti says she sees The Sanctuary at Impact Life Farm as “a care farm with recovery roots.”
After working 26 years in the behavioral health field and being in recovery herself, Personti sought new ways to help those seeking treatment for substance or alcohol use disorder achieve long-term rehabilitation. She found inspiration from her own childhood, spending time on her grandparents’ farm in Galena, Maryland.
“My grandmother…always believed that we should have a connection to nature,” explains Personti, the founder and CEO of Impact Life. “And I think that just kind of planted this foundation for me.”
Fulfilling a decade-long dream, Personti created a similar space in 2020 for women in recovery—one that gives them the support to achieve long-lasting healing.
Across approximately 17 acres in Seaford, 10 women in recovery call Impact Life home, living in a five-bedroom house overlooking open land and a silo and barn with pigs, goats, chickens, cows, and alpacas.
Throughout their time, clients learn how to contribute to the farm and homestead. They also work alongside licensed behavioral and mental health clinicians in one-on-one, group, and family sessions, and take part in mindfulness activities and free time.
Through combining agriculture with the 12 steps of addiction recovery, and creating a safe and relatable environment, Impact Life establishes a plan for restoration, sobriety, and resilience.
Sarah Burke, who has been living at Impact Life since November 2023, was initially drawn to the long-term investment in and support for clients—and the barn full of animals—seeking a change from the 28-day treatment programs she previously attended.
At the farm, Burke took part in nature walks, bonding with new furry friends, playing games like Recovery Jeopardy.
It was through connecting with peers and specialists that she gained hope and security.
“We are all fighting a similar battle, so we all can lift each other up,” she says. “Our situations are different, but the pain is the same, and the power that comes from that [lets us] know we’re going to be OK.” “My story is not harder than anybody else’s story. Some people have had it worse; some people haven’t had it,” she continues. “But my story is my story, and I’m working through that for me.”
Giving and Getting Back
For volunteers at Grateful Acres, being a part of the community behind the care farm is its own reward.
After starting to homeschool her son, Reese, in February 2023, Heather Wharton began searching for volunteer opportunities and found the chance to “get [their] hands dirty and learn some hard work” at Grateful Acres.
With each weekly visit there, Heather has seen Reese become “more comfortable and social” and willing to handle new challenges. “When we first got here, [Kennedy] had small chickens she was about to raise, and he was just nervous around them,” Wharton explains. “And now, if they’re out, he runs, chases them down, and rounds them up.”
Kelly Dakin, along with her sons Liam and Ryan, says working on a care farm has benefited their own well-being.
“As a person who has anxiety, one of the things that I find is sometimes you feel alone in how you’re feeling, and how your worries get you into this negative mindset,” Dakin says. “And being here, and having those feel-good [moments] of helping out, and the community and the animals to love on…it really has been helpful.”
For the last three years, Kennedy has seen how much Grateful Acres and care farms have thrived, and how they have encouraged others to change their own lives.
“I’m always preaching, if you’re afraid to do something, just take the first step,” she explains. “[And] if you have to take two steps backward, that’s OK.”
But while running a care farm isn’t always easy, her team, community, and animals remind her of the mission: to help bring others love, joy, and comfort when they need it most.
And that, Kennedy says, is something for which to be grateful. “I feel now, in my heart, I know that there was a need for this,” she says. “And I don’t question myself anymore.”
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